The Bridegroom Was a Dog by Yoko Tawada

In these three narratives, an ingenious story-teller has created a new kind of fantasy, playful yet vaguely sinister, laced with her own brand of humor, which reviewers have labeled variously as “funky,” “mischievous,” “weird,” and “hilarious.”

The author was in her early thirties when the title story won her country’s highest literary award. In The Bridegroom Was a Dog, an offbeat cram school teacher tells her pupils a story about a little princess whose hand in marriage is promised to a dog as a reward for licking her bottom clean; only to have her own life turned upside down by the sudden appearance of a dog-like man with a predilection for the same part of her anatomy. When rumor-mongering housewives try to force them into a more respectable relationship, both escape into new relationships of their own…

With its publication here, alongside two other equally offbeat but plausible fantasies, readers in the West can now discover for themselves a writer whose inventions are as strange and exhilarating as the best of dreams.

P.S. Beware of pirated copies of important books (with missing sections) circulating online.